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Friday the 13th February 2009 – an unique time in history

Unix Time reaches a milestone in history next week as it hits 1,234,567,890. For those millions of readers of this blog who don’t know what I am talking about (ie most of them I’m sure) Unix Time started at midnight on January 1st 1970 and represents the number of seconds since then.

Unix Time is a way of storing time information on a computer. It isn’t without its issues. For example back in 1970 the boffins chose 32bits as a size of number to represent Unix time in machine code. Unfortunately this means that Unix Time hits the ceiling, ie runs out, in 2038.

This could well lead to another bout of hysteria akin to Y2K with many Unix computers expected to run into problems.

Anyway the point of this blog post is not to worry you too much about what will happen 29 years hence but to celebrate the number. Party animals can join in the fun at the Event on Facebook . Pseudo geeks amongst us can read more here.  Real geeks will already know all they need to know. 

I was originally going to post this on Friday 13th but I figured some of you would want to know in advance.